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The $1 Billion Bargain

The coolest house I ever saw wasn’t a house. It’s Antilia… a 27-story skyscraper in Mumbai. Mukesh Ambani, chairman of the second-largest oil and gas company in India, Reliance Industries, built it for a cool $1 billion.

Just look at this magnificent building…

Bill Gates should be envious. Who else has a 27-story skyscraper in the heart of the hottest city in their country? It has six levels just for parking! And three helipads. Man! Imagine the parties you could throw there!

For a billion dollars, Antilia is a bargain. It’s 400,000 square feet of living space in the best part of one of the largest and most dense cities in the world. When you break that down, it works out to be just $2,500 a square foot.

Compare that to the top penthouses on Central Park these days.

In 2012, the most expensive was the 6,744 square feet at 15 Central Park West. It cost Sandy Weill, former chief of Citibank, $13,049 a square foot.

The first condo to break the $100 million mark, in 2015, was at One 57 on South Central Park. It cost $9,136 per square foot.

Now the leading-edge penthouse at the newest 220 Central Park is being offered at $250 million for 23,000 square feet. For four floors and 16 bedrooms in the hottest part of Manhattan, you only have to fork over $10,870 per square foot.

We whisked by the $200 million mark without blinking.

And buyers think these are bargains?!

Do you know how I spell these bargains?

B – U – B – B – L – E!

Even our Australian subscribers, who live in the uber-bubbly cities of Sydney and Melbourne, are wondering what the hell we’re smoking over here!

Of course, it can’t just stop there. Beverly Hills won’t be outdone!

Jaws were dropping when a 53,000-square-foot property with vineyards was listed for $195 million. Hey, that’s only $3,679 per square foot.

Now there’s a new listing in Bel Air for… you guessed it… a whopping $250 million! There must be some kind of billionaire club you can only join if you buy a home for at least a quarter of a billion dollars.

And guess what the developer had to say about this new listing? “Why would a billionaire pay $220 million for a yacht, and not that or more for his house?”

That’s bubble logic if I’ve ever heard it.

Look at this photograph…

This house is 38,000 square feet. It has 12 bedrooms, 21 bathrooms (rich people must need to pee more from all the champagne they drink at the house’s five bars), three kitchens, a four-lane bowling alley, an 85-foot infinity pool with an outdoor pop-up theater-size movie screen, and an indoor 40-seat movie theater… and of course, a helipad on top. Don’t even look at the car and candy collections inside.

At $6,578 a square foot, this is perhaps the highest price ever asked for a suburban mansion.

Personally, I’d take the $2,500-per-square-foot skyscraper in Mumbai over any of these local houses. It’s a bargain in bubbleville.

“Market bubbles are often a mass delusion, where investors wrongly assume that prices move in only one direction – UP! And nowhere is this delusion clearer than in real estate,” says economist… Read More>>

Harry studied economics in college in the ’70s, but found it vague and inconclusive. He became so disillusioned by the state of the profession that he turned his back on it. Instead, he threw himself into the burgeoning New Science of Finance, which married economic research and market research and encompassed identifying and studying demographic trends, business cycles, consumers’ purchasing power and many, many other trends that empowered him to forecast economic and market changes.